Doralee Brooks
Hips
—After Lucille Clifton/Patricia Smith
My hips hold me on weak knees and unsteady ankles as I pull spiky weeds
like needles from the side of the house wearing Michael’s leather work gloves.
He tells me to spray and wait, but I don’t have patience.
I used to brace Janine on the left hip and take her older brother by the hand
many mornings when we walked a block to the sitter’s house.
Hips girdled and stockinged, I’d speed down a steep cobble-stoned street
past Crescent Elementary,
hop the 88 Frankstown, transfer to the Hill, arrive an hour
before St. Benedict the Moor’s A.M. Kindergarten,
a morning of What are you wearing?
If you’re wearing red, stand up; if you’re wearing brown, sit down.
A morning of open shut them open shut them give a little clap,
open shut them open shut them fold them in your lap.
Janine liked to plant her small hands on what would become her hips
(You know the pose),
an unruly posture she carried into her teens,
a provocation she eventually learned not to do in classes, readings, conversations.
A tell, code, blues, she learned to subdue, then learned to uproot.
Doralee Brooks is a Madwoman in the Attic instructor for Carlow University. She is a fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project (95) and Cave Canem (97 and 99). Her poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies. Doralee’s chapbook, When I Hold You Up to the Light, won the 2019 Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest published by Main Street Rag. She is City of Asylum’s Poet Laureate of Allegheny County 2022-2024.